CROATIAN
RHAPSODY: BORDERLANDS

I live in a Bronx apartment
building where one of my neighbors is from Saint Croix. For most of the
others around us, the difference between a country in Southeast Europe
and an island in the Caribbean is barely audible once they hear the
words ‘Croatian’ and ‘Cruzan.’ Even if we are worlds apart, in The
Bronx, the difference between Croatia and Saint Croix is neither obvious
nor important. Croatian Rhapsody: Borderlands is an attempt to
differentiate Croatian and Cruzan by asking how to reclaim the
specificity of the place we come from and how to articulate its affect
on what we have been and what we are.

In a world with over 500 million international migrants, redefining the
meanings of national identity and cultural identification inevitably
becomes a global process. Genetically and culturally, we can no longer
be labeled as only one thing or another. Our national identities are
much more complex than which country we hold a passport from.

Born in a country that was ravaged by war and no longer exists, having a
passport from another, and living in a third, I create a rhapsody of the
place that used to be my home, and maybe still is, in ways that both
reinforce and undermine the semantic richness of the work’s title.
Historically, the rhapsodic tradition¬ anticipates the theme of a
return-to-homeland. In ancient Greece, “rhapsodist” was the name given
to a reciter of epic poetry, such as Homer was in his day. In both of
Homer’s major works, the hero finds the landscapes completely
unrecognizable and shrouded in metaphorical mist after he returns to
homeland. In the nineteenth century, Franz Liszt popularized the style
with his Hungarian Rhapsodies, which stemmed from his nostalgic return
to his native country, which he describes as if he experiences it for
the first time.

In addition to the national and political theme, rhapsody suggests a
break from formally conventional expressions of nationality in the way
it references, literally, a "stitched song." That is to say a rhapsody
is fragmented, never seamless. My work is directly influenced by that
tradition.

As an emigrant who spent the last fourteen years outside of my homeland,
I wondered, if I were to rhapsodize about Croatia visually, what might
that mean? I create an unusual album of seemingly unrelated images that
fuses photographic genres and formal conventions, bodies and landscapes,
objects and places, and oscillates between modalities of description and
speculation. Following the rhapsodic tradition and directly referencing
the works of Homer and Liszt, I paint a picture of contemporary Croatia
seen through the eyes of someone who has been away for fourteen years,
and whose national and cultural identities have slowly become more and
more complex.

The project is accompanied by a short story about a post-war mountain
town told by a female narrator.